American idyll

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American Idyll (original title American Pastoral ) is a novel by the American writer Philip Roth . The book was published in the USA in 1997; in Germany the novel was published in 1998 in a translation by Werner Schmitz . Philip Roth received the Pulitzer Prize for this work in 1998 . Time included it in its list of the Top One Hundred English Language Novels from 1923 to 2005 .

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The theme of the novel is the examination of the American way of life using the example of the third generation of Jewish immigrants from Poland. Nathan Zuckerman remembers his childhood and school days in the Newark neighborhood of Weequahic and his relationship with the Levov Brothers (Kp. Eins). When he met them again after 40 years, Seymour and Jerry Levov were well integrated into society as manufacturers of fine leather gloves and cardiac surgeons, and he himself as a writer. Before that, they had to go through the stage of assimilation . Seymour, sports idol and entrepreneur's son, called the Swede because of his appearance , wanted to emancipate himself from his strong father Lou, who tried to keep him in the Jewish colony, and his tradition. So he married the beauty queen (Kp. Five) Mary Dawn Dwyer from a Catholic working-class family of Irish descent, but avoided breaking with the patriarch, whose successor he was supposed to be in the business, and had him participate in decision-making and the bride should be asked about her planned upbringing . The conversation with the intelligent Dawn ended with a compromise (cp. Nine). The harmony-seeking Seymour and his wife, an ideal couple in their appearance, maintained family contacts, but adapted outside their communities to the American lifestyle of the wealthy. In order to confirm his ideal of the equality and impartiality of the new generation, Seymour bought an old 18th century estate with large estates as a family home, contrary to his father's advice, who warned him against the prejudices of conservative Americans against Jews a rural area with a traditional Republican population. He, Dawn and their daughter Merredith (Merry) felt at home there, lived as if in an idyll and had friendly contacts with the neighbors, but compared to the architect William (Bill) Orcutt they felt that they were an invisible divide from the white Protestant Elite with ancestors from the wars of liberation with their social privileges separates. But they were among the capitalists in their daughter's opinion, and in 1968 the crisis in American society hit and destroyed the Levov family.

The conflict was triggered by the rebellion of 16-year-old Merry against the lifestyle of her successful wealthy parents, against whom her criticism of capitalism is directed. That shocked Seymour and Dawn, who had guarded her and raised her in a liberal style. The girl seemed to develop normally, only her stuttering required special therapy from Sheila Salzman. With her mother she was on the one hand looking after the cattle on her farm in Old Rimrock (Kp. Five), on the other hand she criticized their role as rural women during her puberty. The father-daughter relationship, with its erotic approaches, was particularly intense and was only burdened by the argument about the production of noble women's gloves with poorly paid female workers. During this phase, Merry radicalized, first in discussions with father and grandfather about the Vietnam War, where Seymour showed understanding and wanted to persuade them to use legal forms of protest. But peaceful demonstrations were not enough for her. She searched for the radical Weathermen scene , went into hiding, killed people in bomb attacks and, as Mary Stoltz, hid from the investigators with underground groups. This hit Seymour at the core of his family and bourgeois ideas and unsettled him up to the point of incapacity to act. B. against the accusation of his brother that he raised his daughter wrongly and gave her too much leeway (Kp. Six) or the fundamental criticism of his father in the discussion with the progressive professor Marcia Umanoff of the morality of young people (Kp. Eight).

Zuckerman's idea to write a novel about the life crisis of Seymour Levov, whom he admired as an athlete in the 1940s (Part 1, Memories of Paradise), and his family, emerged at the 45th grade meeting of his former high school comrades in 1995 (Kp. Two and Three), when Jerry tells him about the first marriage of his brother, who recently died of cancer, and his failed daughter, the terrorist Merry, and Nathan remembers an encounter with the Swede . At that time he mentioned his three sons from his second marriage, showed him a vacation picture in front of the vacation home in Puerto Rico and explained to him that he had to relocate glove manufacturing from Newark to countries with lower wages. The author suspects a secret behind this divergent news that he wants to reveal in a novel. He visits the plot locations as inspiration for his invented plots and interpretations, but his explorations remain patchy. The result is a fragmentary story with a look back at the time of crisis in American self-confidence (title) in connection with the Vietnam War , the Watergate affair, the protest movements in 1968 and the rioting in the cities.

In his novel, Zuckerman concentrates on the inner perspective of Seymour, who got deeper and deeper into a personality crisis with delusions, no longer trusted his friends and in which at the end of the novel the table conversations mixed with dreams or memories of his daughter's happy childhood in the natural idyll (cf. . Nine). Outwardly, he continued to run his business normally, appeared calm and friendly, but became increasingly entangled in labyrinthine cycles of reflection and feelings of guilt, lost the ground under his feet and reacted increasingly helpless and powerless, especially since it was difficult for him in his naivete to get behind Dawn's facade and friends, including his own, to look. He was looking for his daughter, fell for the cheater Rita Cohen (Kp. Four), and wanted to find out what role she had played in the attacks and whether she had been incited and instrumentalized against her wealthy parents. After five years he found Merry in a poor condition (bp six). As Jaina , she lived ascetically with the goal of starving to avoid harming nature (Part 2 The Fall of Man), which, according to Jerry's information, she succeeded, although her father visited her again and again and tried to save her. While according to the official family version, which was also shared by neighbors and friends, terrorists seduced the gullible daughter, married life collapsed behind this backdrop: Seymour had a brief affair with the therapist Salzman, the wife of a doctor friend. Mary Dawn gradually broke away from her family. Initially, she needed psychiatric treatment for suicidal depression. Then she suppressed the actions of her daughter, had her face lifted, no longer wanted to live in the old stone house, planned a modern villa with the architect and painter Orcutt and had an affair with him. (Part 3 Paradise Lost). Your further fate remains open in the novel.

filming

In 2016 the novel was directed by Ewan McGregor filmed , who is also the lead role of Seymour Levov took over. Dakota Fanning and Jennifer Connelly can also be seen in other roles .

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ hanser-literaturverlage.de
  2. ↑ See All-Time 100 Novels - American Pastoral .